


Much Ado About Planet Scanning

by MiyabiDreams



Series: Elysia [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Dwelling on the past, Gen, Unhealthy Obsession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 08:26:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3761491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiyabiDreams/pseuds/MiyabiDreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The crew is worried about Elysia's new pastime of strip-mining unpopulated planets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Much Ado About Planet Scanning

The Normandy was quieter than usual, denoting that a large portion of the crew had turned in for the night. There were voices coming from the mess though, and while he wasn't the most social of men, Krios was drawn by the quiet discussion. Two...three...four voices that he could distinguish immediately as he approached, and when he rounded the partition separating the tables, they all faded off as heads turned.

"Coffee?" the mess sergeant offered after a moment, rallying magnificently; the crew was more than a little nervous about having an assassin on board, even more so than they'd been when Shepard had found the mercenary, the goddamn founder of the Blue Suns and stowed him in the surveillance deck. And then there were the Cerberus personnel that didn't know what to make of how many non-humans were coming aboard. At least they were all polite, from what Tali'Zorah and Garrus had reported. Thane didn't know either way, as much as he stayed to himself.

"Thank you," he replied quietly as he took a seat separate from the others, taking the cup when it was offered and Gardner sat with his own. One of the other crewmen nodded to him, shifting to cross her legs under the table, her eyes shifting up to him then back toward their pilot. Thane's eyes flicked toward him in kind, and Joker grimaced slightly. He excused himself back to the cockpit, trying to hobble inconspicuously.

"So anyway..."

"Right! Right, ok, so you guys have seen the Commander lately, right?" the woman asked as she looked around at them all, and an amused little smile on her face. "Every time we enter a new system, we don't even look for missions, she just launches dozens of probes. It's like she can't leave a single planet without poking at it!"

"She probably just doesn't want to run out of fuel while we're looking for stuff. Or she wants to hoard the resources for herself and sell them at a profit."

"Isn't that what pirates start out doing?"

"Then maybe she wants to build a platinum statue of hers-"

"It isn't that."

Every head turned toward Thane. When his hands folded in front of his mouth like that, they knew he was going to say something either uncomfortable or profound, or both. At least, those few that had ever spoken to him knew. He never got the chance to continue though, as their armory's resident turian wandered into view in search of some late snack and stopped when he heard the conversation, chuckling quietly at the idea of Elysia Shepard being so full of herself as to have anything more than a holo with herself and some other person around.

"He's right, you know. It's mostly a matter of safety. Didn't you notice she's been like this since we got the Professor on board?"

They had to pause and think about that. He was right, they realized. It was only since the addition of the asari, Samara and their drell, that Shepard had begun the unhealthy stints at the galaxy map, but it had been from the moment that Mordin Solus had set foot on the new Normandy that she had been collecting resources to use on upgrades.

"She's that obsessed with upgrading the already most advanced warship in Alliance space?" One of the other crewmen laughed at that, only to be cut off when Thane's hands met the table again.

"She is obsessed with the safety of the people she cares about, even if she has never met them before," he replied quietly, and every eye turned to him, even as Garrus took a seat on the opposite side of the table from him and nodded in agreement.

"When the Normandy went down the first time, Shepard's only thought was to get the rest of her crew out of there. She never went near an evac shuttle," Garrus explained. "When Joker was shoved into the last one, that was the only time she worried about it, and by then there wasn't enough of the Normandy left to hold onto. She's...goddamn selfless. Stupidly so. Do you know that when we were on the hunt for Saren, she kept making stops every time she encountered a distress signal? It was ridiculous and it made everything take so much longer, but it was noble. In a weird way."

"I heard about that. Extranet reports about the great Commander Shepard flying around the galaxy righting every single wrong she found. Might as well have been listening to old broadcasts about heroes on Earth," the first crewman chuckled, leaning forward with her hands around her cup, watching Garrus as he spoke. Krios...he seemed to be listening especially close.

"Right. There were even missions that she took me on that we weren't allowed to hurt a single noncombatant, no matter who it was or what the circumstances were. I remember one mission, a biotic terrorist cell had drugged up a lot of human scientists so that they were at risk of wandering into the middle of the fight. We had to make sure we got in close to every enemy just to make sure that none of them got hurt. I walked out of there with a limp and Alenko had a migraine for the rest of the night after that, but we got out of there and every single scientist was flown out. Nothing worse than a bruise on any one of them. But Shepard, ha, she still checked up on them as soon as she was able to get back out into the system. Same with some girl that she met on the Citadel that had been captured by slavers."

"Talitha," Thane cut in softly, looking first at Garrus, then back down at the lightly steaming coffee in front of him. "A very young girl that was taken from Mindoire. When Shepard was young, batarians attacked the colony that she and this girl were part of. It is...not my place to say more, but it is one of the reasons that she worries about the people she is close to. Her way of protecting them- and us- is collecting what she can to give us the best chance possible of coming out of this mission intact. With the loss of her home, she has filled her heart with the entire galaxy."

The others were quiet after that. What was funny before simply became sad, and they were just a little guilty for joking about it. Thane, meanwhile, simply finished his coffee and returned the mug to the counter behind which Gardner worked. He paused in his walk back to Life Support, making a detour to the med bay briefly, then taking the elevator up to the CIC. Sure enough, there Shepard was, the circles under her eyes darkened with the need to sleep. She was leaning heavily against the rail around her post, looking over the readings for the ice giant she was surveying. There was a permanent little inverted V between her brows, concentration drawing her expression in, pursing her full lips and making the shadows under her high cheekbones deeper. She launched another probe the moment she found another spike of platinum, getting the announcement from EDI that there was nothing left for them to take from this planet and setting Joker on his flight path to the next one. She didn't even notice when Thane mounted the shallow steps behind her, until his hand lighted on her shoulder.

"Siha," he murmured, and pressed into her hands a small glass, as well as a pair of tablets. "You need to rest."

"Give me another couple of hours," Shepard argued, the frown on her face making her lower lip push out in a petulant little pout.

" _A couple more hours_ invariably turns into another twenty-four hours without rest," Thane pointed out, "and when we arrive at the Migrant Fleet, the last thing Tali'Zorah needs is for her captain to faint in the middle of her hearing."

"Thane, don't try to guilt me-"

"Elysia."

The way Shepard's eyes narrowed would have made most men back up at least three large steps and then sprint in the other direction. Thane was steadfast in his gentle attempts to draw her away from the map and toward the elevator though. Eventually, his persistence won out. There was a murmur from the overhead speakers:

_"God, finally, I thought I was gonna piss myself."_

**Author's Note:**

> Elysia Shepard is the most successful Femshep I've ever run in my entire time playing, and I've had many thoughts about her history and her relationships with the rest of the crew. This is set during ME2 (I haven't played ME3 yet save for the demo available on Origin, due to circumstances largely beyond my control, so I don't know a damn thing about Vega or Traynor or Javik or anyone else.)


End file.
